Pastors, doctors and grassroots activists spent more than two hours lambasting N.C. Gov. Pat McCrory and his Republican allies in state government Monday during a protest rally in uptown Charlotte.

Organizers estimated the crowd, many brandishing homemade posters critical of the General Assembly, totaled between 2,000 and 3,000 people.

The Rev. Dwayne Walker, pastor at Little Rock AME Zion Church, delivered the keynote speech at the event in Marshall Park. Standing in the shadows of the Government Center, where McCrory served a record seven terms as Charlotte mayor, the pastor blasted the Republican governor for presiding over a legislative session that reduced unemployment benefits, loosened gun control, tightened abortion restrictions and enacted major shifts in election policies, including a requirement to show ID when voting.

“Some of us in Charlotte thought you were a friend of all people,” Walker said Monday, wiping sweat from his brow as an overcast day morphed into a humid, sun-splashed late afternoon. “You have become the poster child for the Tea Party.”

The rally marked the first Moral Monday event in Charlotte. Beginning April 29, a coalition of religious and advocacy groups across the state began staging protests at the state Capitol in Raleigh. Tens of thousands of people attended, and more than 900 were arrested for civil disobedience. Those arrests stemmed from protesters clogging hallways and slowing access in the Capitol building.

Last month, after the General Assembly adjourned, Asheville hosted the first Moral Monday protest beyond Raleigh. Kojo Nantambu, president of the local NAACP chapter, said more rallies and protests would be held in Charlotte in the weeks and months ahead. Nantambu spoke through much of the rally Monday uptown.

Walker broached the idea of a voter petition to recall McCrory as governor. Nantambu led the crowd in chants of, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Pat McCrory has got to go.”

McCrory’s press secretary could not be reached Monday night for a response. During the protests in Raleigh, the governor refused to meet with Moral Monday protesters.

State Rep. Ruth Samuelson, a Mecklenburg Republican and close ally of House Speaker Thom Tillis, told me earlier Monday, “We as Republicans need to do a better job helping people understand why our election reforms are good for North Carolina.”

The election changes go beyond requiring identification to eliminate straight-ticket voting and same-day voter registration, among other things. The number of early voting days is being reduced, too. Samuelson said other shifts, including expanded hours each day of early voting, will provide more access, not less.

Last week, the left-leaning Raleigh firm Public Policy Polling released a survey showing the governor’s approval numbers at their lowest point since McCrory took office in January. Thirty-nine percent of voters in the 600-person poll approve of the job McCrory is doing, PPP found. A smaller number endorsed the General Assembly: 24 percent. Republicans became the majority party in 2010 in both houses of the legislature, the first time that had happened in more than a century.

In 2012, McCrory became the state’s first GOP governor in 20 years and the House (77-43) and Senate (33-17) became Republican super-majorities. That paved the way for the corporate-friendly agenda of the just-completed session. State lawmakers rejected a federal Medicaid expansion that would have provided health care coverage to an additional 500,000 people. McCrory and other Republicans said accepting the federal assistance, which would have been fully funded by Washington for the first three years, threatened the state’s long-term fiscal health.

“Unemployment and the labor market have had a disproportionate impact on rural communities and communities of color,” analyst John Quinterno told me. Quinterno, principal at Chapel Hill research firm South by North Strategies, said the Moral Monday movement’s focus on jobs and unemployment isn’t surprising, given the sharp cutbacks in benefits approved by the current administration.

“You can see why, it affects a lot of folks,” he said, noting 170,000 North Carolinians receiving federal benefits lost their assistance or eligibility for help when the new law took effect in July. Quinterno said Republicans and Democrats in the legislature “have been short-sighted from an economic perspective.”

South by North Strategies found that the state’s net gain of 21,300 jobs through the first seven months of 2013 represents a decline of 49 percent from the same period a year ago.

George Battle III, general counsel for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and a Democrat running for Congressman Mel Watt’s seat, was among a slew of candidates and politicians attending. Organizers of Moral Monday include the NAACP, Greenpeace, Action NC, Democracy NC and the state teachers’ union. Nantambu and others stressed a nonpartisan agenda, but all of the candidates and current office-holders who came to the Marshall Park protest were Democrats.

“Hopefully, after the fall of 2014, (Republican lawmakers) will be a more receptive audience,” Battle told me. He cited the election law as the most serious issue because, in Battle’s opinion, the changes threaten what he called the “building blocks” of democracy.

Former county commissioners chair Parks Helms and former City Council member Nancy Carter stood to the side of the stage, engulfed by a crowd that stretched up a sloping hill and around a pond in the uptown park.

At-large City Council candidate Vi Lyles mingled with attendees, and a couple of people with her wore T-shirts and buttons touting her election bid. Most of the signs sprinkled through the crowd satirized and lamented the McCrory-GOP agenda. “Scat Pat Scat,” “Give Teachers A Living Wage Not Cookies” and several versions of text-inspired posters (“OMG GOP WTF”) dotted the park. Others dispensed with the slightest modicum of subtlety: “NC Legislature is American Taliban” and “GOP Agenda Eviscerate Public Schools.”

For all the rhetoric, the movement faces significant obstacles. Redistricting in 2011 strengthened the Republicans’ grip on the majority of districts and, last fall, McCrory cruised to an easy win over former Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton. No front-runner has emerged among Democrats to challenge the current governor in 2016.

GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney carried the state four years after Barack Obama won North Carolina in 2008. This despite Democrats staging the national convention renominating Obama last year in Charlotte. Republicans occupy nine of the 13 Congressional seats across the state.

One of them, Patrick McHenry of the 10 District, told me in an earlier interview Monday that all of the controversy swirling around the General Assembly will dissipate in the spring of 2014.

“When North Carolinians pay their taxes next year, I think they’ll see the benefit of this last legislative session,” McHenry said.